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memory, or using hard timing loops. Compare ill-behaved, vaxism, unixism. Also, PC-ware n., a program full of PC-isms on a machine with a more capable operating system. Pejorative. |
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PD /P-D/ adj. Common abbreviation for 'public domain', applied to software distributed over Usenet and from Internet archive sites. Much of this software is not in fact public domain in the legal sense but travels under various copyrights granting reproduction and use rights to anyone who can snarf a copy. See copyleft. |
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PDL /P-D-L/, /pid'l/, /p d'l/ or /puhd'l/ 1. n. 'Program Design Language'. Any of a large class of formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which management forces one to design programs. Too often, management expects PDL descriptions to be maintained in parallel with the code, imposing massive overhead to little or no benefit. See also flowchart. 2. v. To design using a program design language. "I've been pdling so long my eyes won't focus beyond 2 feet." 3. n. 'Page Description Language'. Refers to any language which is used to control a graphics device, usually a laser-printer. The most common example is, of course, Adobe's PostScript language, but there are many others, such as Xerox InterPress, etc. |
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pdl /pid'l/ or /puhd'l/ n. [abbreviation for 'Push Down List'] 1. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for stack. See overflow pdl. 2. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of Zork; (his network address on the ITS machines was at one time pdl@dms). 3. Rarely, any sense of PDL, as these are not invariably capitalized. |
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PDP-10 n. [Programmed Data Processor model 10] The machine that made timesharing real. It looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab, Stanford, and CMU. Some aspects of the instruction set (most notably the bit-field instructions) are still considered unsurpassed. The 10 was eventually eclipsed by the VAX machines (descendants of the PDP-11) when DEC recognized that the 10 and VAX product lines were competing with each other and decided to concentrate its software development effort on the more profitable VAX. The machine was finally dropped from DEC's line in 1983, following the failure of the Jupiter Project at DEC to build a viable new model. (Some attempts by other companies to market clones came to nothing; see Foonly and Mars.) This event spelled the doom of ITS and the technical cultures that had spawned the original Jargon File, but by mid-1991 it had become something of a badge |
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